But what if you’re a mobile phone luddite? How do you get that profane fifteen second mp3 to your mobile phone? Well, Reader Seb LeM. got an excellent piece of verboten advice from a Verizon CSR on how to just email it to your phone. Easy peasy!

Scott’s tip after the jump.

I recently had an interesting experience with that oh-so-wonderful phone and bill provider: Verizon Wireless. I own a Motorola E815 and saw all of the company’s ads about how you can rip your own music to your phone so that you can listen to it “on the go.” I’ve gone through a remarkable amount of struggles with this phone in attempts to get my own music on it to be used as ringtones. A friend of mine is a Cingular customer and has never had nearly this amount of trouble.

So tonight I brought up the courage to face the forboding customer service reps at a local Verizon shop in an attempt to figure out how to go about uploading my own ringtones to my phone as an alternative to paying $2.99 for 15 second clips downloadable from Verizon’s music store…

I explained my situation to that weird person who always stands at the front of the store with the manufactured smile. He told me to talk to the guy in the little booth at the tech service desk. I explained my situation there, and what followed is a tip that I figured would be valuable to fellow Consumerist readers who also subscribe to Verizon and don’t want to pay $2.99 for the first 15 seconds of Europe’s “Final Countdown.” Apparently, if you create an MP3 file that’s less than something like 200k in size and rename the file extension to .mid instead of .mp3, you can upload it to your phone by e-mailing it to [your number]@vzwpix.com. When you get the text message, the sound clip should be attached. Save it to your sounds folder and then apply it as a ringtone. Although I was skeptical, it actually worked! Remarkable. Furthermore, the tech guy said “…I’m not supposed to tell you this.” So apparently, this is something VZW doesn’t want its consumers to know about.

Well, while the VZW ringtones store may offer a plentiful bounty of Shakira and Jay Z tracks, I couldn’t find Tokyo Ska Paradise’s version of the Tetris theme. Looks like I’m making “midis” tonight.

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I was so thrilled until I went to apply my clip as a ringtone and the option is not there. For the other two pre-installed clips on my phone the menu reads “send in message, send to picplace, apply as ringtone” but for the one I just stored the “apply as ringtone” option is not there. So close!

Your mileage my vary. I’ve got service from Verizon for my LG VX5200. I made the mp3/mid file, and then emailed it to myself. I can listen to the clip on my phone, but even after I save it, it doesn’t appear on my list of ringtones.

Didn’t see cristy‘s or crayonshinobi‘s posts before I posted mine. I checked out the v710 forum linked to above, and while it had good information, none of it helped. I’m still having the same problem cristy is – I can get the songs to my phone, but can’t choose them as ringtones.

I am not sure why, but when I take a .mpeg file and rename it to .mid it works, but if I try it with a standard .mp3, it doesn’t. But now that I know the trick I am having fun putting completely obnoxious things on my V710.